Failed Reviews
Silent Hill: Homecoming - Part One
By Jamie Love - January 7th, 2009
In the earnest attempt to review Silent Hill: Homecoming last year, my mind, and subsequently my writing about the game, got lost along the way. What I was left with was a swirling mess of papers that no editor would touch, some four thousand words that thwarted my attempt to regain control of the piece. Returning to it now, I believe the myriad of strands it pulls together to be worth some slight consideration. Enough that I will risk revealing that I am, in fact, human, and more often than I’ll admit, subject to mistakes. But with that in mind, I still hope that this mistake wields a few interesting results. Enjoy!
Failed Reviews - Silent Hill: Homecoming – Part 1 of 3
I arrive in Silent Hill on a stretcher. Rolled along a dimly lit corridor by a man resembling a doctor, I catch quick glimpses of carnival horrors - scenes that are strange for the sake of being strange. But before any of these sights register, I’m left alone in a dark operating room. Outside of the room, that same Doctor is eviscerated by a creature just beyond my line of sight. Suddenly I’m prompted to tap the X button repeatedly in order to break the straps restraining my wrists. The act implies urgency, expecting to soon be torn apart myself. But as I manage to break my bonds, the urgency passes and there are no creatures bursting into the room. Instead I’m presented with a momentary peace, an unnerving opportunity to fidget with the controls and hesitantly prepare for what my mind imagines waiting beyond those doors.
Developers seem eager to discard the cinematic introduction. But computer generated eye-candy was an obligatory staple not only as fuel for marketing trickery, but also an unfortunate means by which many titles would be judged before knowing anything about the actual game-play. I’m certainly guilty of having bought games for shine over substance through the years. When Parasite Eve first released, I watched the introduction three times at EBGames. After buying the game, I came home and forced several other people to watch it before giving any thought to playing it. The game-play was reasonably good, and certainly improved by the sequel. But at that time, the act of playing was somehow a tedious diversion, something to be hurriedly completed in order to reach another cinematic. [Yes, I’m admitting to having been a cinematic whore].
The cinematic opening became the obligatory means for establishing narrative, despite the fact that games had been capable of doing so long before the introduction of CD technology. Square Soft was arguably the master of this technique. The company coined the term “cinematic RPG,” and blessed all previous titles in their library with CG sequences regardless of whether it added or often detracted from their earlier masterpieces. It was hypnotic for a time, and proved successful at creating the appearance of progress in game design. There was an allure to the idea that actual game-play would eventually become indistinguishable from CG, creating some state of hyper realism. Final Fantasy VII was the Christ-like figure of this pursuit, equally revered and crucified. It portioned the cinematic out until, like Pavlov’s dogs, I was trained to persevere in order to receive my treat. And if only later I came to realize the weight of elements like narrative and game-depth because they had started vanishing in subsequent titles, well, tell me you’ve never been a sucker for a pretty face.
Having now gorged myself on many examples of style sans the substance, I’m eager for titles that find more subtle uses for CG, or disregard it all together. But in survival horror, cinematic sequences proved more necessary for a time. Where the RPG used CG to create visual representations of landscapes and creatures, I’d been doing the same thing in my mind since the original Final Fantasy. With the emergence of the Resident Evil series however, the cinematic became essential in amplifying the horror of the creatures that confronted me. Certainly one realized that the moving stack of red and pink polygons was monstrous and bloody, but the cinematic rendering enhanced the horror, creating images that I then projected over the rough designs to achieve a more realistic image of fear.
My seminal moment with this came when I encountered Resident Evil 2’s “Licker.” Watching the creature’s long tongue slowly stretch outward, and the way every inch of it seemed to ooze created an image that couldn’t have been captured in-game at the time. This also caused cinematic sequences to take on a different meaning within the survival horror genre. Since their usage introduced new creatures to fight, these scenes became an inevitable symbol that I was about to be attacked in some new, unforeseen way. The cinematic was no longer a reward. Additionally I began developing a separation anxiety as these scenes separated me from controlling my character. When Resident Evil 2’s Licker drops from the ceiling, I am thrust back into control, disoriented from that separation and more likely to make mistakes. It’s one way in which survival horror appears to function in complete opposition to conventional game design.
